I have been digging into the Task Parallel library lately, and enjoying it a lot. As an exercise, I wondered if I could implement the classic FizzBuzz problem, using only Tasks, no loop-related keyword, and no method or property. To enforce this is, we’ll get FizzBuzz to run in the Main() method of a simple console, using only variables created locally.

Note: this is clearly a totally preposterous way to use the Task Parallel library. There is absolutely no benefit in using it in this context, I am doing this only for the sake of exploring how tasks work.

So how would we go about that?

A Task represents an asynchronous operation; it wraps a block of code, waiting to be executed. For instance, the following code queues up work to print out “Starting” to the console, and begins execution when we request the Task to start:

We clearly need something more for FizzBuzz. If we want to avoid looping constructs, we need to have a form of recursion going on, so that we can work on increasing integers, until we reach the limit we set to our FizzBuzz.

Fortunately, Tasks are about more than simply executing a block of code; they can be composed, defining what tasks can be started when some precursor tasks are finished. In particular, Tasks allow Continuations: what to do once a specific task terminates can be defined, by using Task.ContinueWith(), as in this example:

Here we define our root task, still printing “Starting”, and another task, which will print “Next task!”, and we pass that nextTask as a follow-up task to the rootTask via ContinueWith. Running this code will execute first the rootTask, and upon completion, kickstart the second one, and print both expected lines to the Console.